Burnt Orange

The Dutch tend to see themselves as a tolerant and antiracist nation, despite frequent evidence to the contrary. One area in cultural life that is both a site of stardom for nonwhite Dutch and a site of extreme racism and prejudice is popular sports and especially football (or soccer). Games played by the national soccer team are major events, in particular when the team comes near the finals in a European or world championship. In such cases, practices of television viewing run over into public social life and carnivalesque outbursts of sports loving and nationalist joy. This article will draw on interviews held with soccer fans that focused on nationalism and ethnicity. The author is interested in the pleasures of television sports viewing and football fandom, and in the representation of the male body (often signified in explicitly ethnic and racial terms) in television sports reporting as perceived by audiences.